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  • image Adam vol.55/86
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/86

Purpose

Capriccio showing a bird's-eye view of a circular vaulted hall with a central round pier and two tiers of colonnade. This is possibly surrounded by water crossed by bridges to a tiered platform with niches and screens behind.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 86

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen142 x 258

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

star in circle

Notes

The two related drawings in Adam vol.55/79 and 80 may show details of the curved exterior walls of this composition. The use of the bird's-eye technique, relatively rare in Robert Adam's work, is also found in Adam vol.55/43 and 47. The composition of the round central pier and radiating vaulting is also in Robert Adam's picturesque inventions of the late 1770s. The building here may have been inspired by the circular underground hall of the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, which Adam visited in September 1755 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.180).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).